London — The quiet transformation of a participant
An account from London of how a young woman, drawn into a children's class as a guest, was carried through the institute by the friends around her — and is now accompanying others as a tutor.
She was thirteen when she first walked into a children’s class — not as a teacher, not as a parent, but as the older sister of a child who was attending. She came back the next week. The teacher noticed and, quietly, began inviting her into the conversations that happen around the activity rather than inside it.
A year later she enrolled in a junior youth group and, when the next cohort of teenagers in her neighbourhood gathered for the first book of the institute, she was there. Two of the youth in that study circle were animators of her own junior youth group from the year before; they were now also her companions in the study of the Word.
It would be too tidy to say there was a single moment of transformation. There were many. There was the moment she was first asked to lead a song in a devotional. The moment she helped plan, then deliver, a children’s class lesson — terrified, in front of seven six-year-olds — and saw that the children were not waiting for someone perfect. The moment she gave her first home visit. The moment, almost imperceptibly, that her own sister, watching her, decided to join the junior youth group.
She is now eighteen. She is a tutor. There are four young women she is accompanying, each two or three books behind her, each becoming, in her quiet steady way, somebody who will accompany others.
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